MY FIRST WEEK AT RCA, I met Senior Vice President McDreamy. Randy Goodman had the classically handsome features of a Hollywood movie star. He dressed well, like he had just stepped out of a Brooks Brothers catalog. His hair was perfectly cut to accent his face, he wore glasses, and he seemed to give off an aura of light. He was the senior VP of marketing, and he was Joe’s right-hand man. I rarely saw one of them without the other. When Randy first came into my office, I thought, Oh shit, this could be a problem. When he told me his name, I smiled like a schoolgirl. Randy . . . how appropriate.
Randy functioned as the general manager of RCA, even though Joe didn’t give him the money or the title. He was involved in every aspect of product development, which meant I saw him every day. I got used to the daily adrenaline rush when I heard him coming down the hall, got used to my temperature rising when he appeared in my doorway. Sometimes Randy and I just stared at each other, sizing each other up like animals in a zoo. After he’d leave my office, I’d run to the secretaries to talk about how handsome he was. I was in serious trouble.
From the beginning, Randy fascinated me. We had a natural rapport, which I used to my advantage. For example, I pretended I didn’t know what price positioning was just so he could explain it to me, which he did with customary patience.
Randy was married too, but he wasn’t dead. He flirted with me as much as I flirted with him, the sexual tension flowing thick like honey. I knew it was wrong to daydream about banging him, but I couldn’t help myself. Coworkers began making fun of me for being so obviously attracted to him, and all I could do was smile and nod.
At the same time, I sensed something different about Randy, something that went beyond Ahmet’s philosophy of do whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want, with whomever you want. Randy radiated something pure and decent, something I wasn’t used to feeling from a man in the music business. He was the first man in my experience who said please and thank you—with Ahmet and Doug, it was just, “Get me this, get me that.” He was the first man who seemed secure in the presence of a strong, smart woman. He didn’t dumb himself down for me, and he didn’t expect me to dumb myself down for him.
In fact, Randy was the opposite of Ahmet in nearly every way. He was the opposite of me in many ways, too. He was refined, and he never cursed or lost his temper. I felt feral in comparison. For me, the word “fuck” was a verb, noun, adjective, and anything else I needed it to be. I wanted to learn from Randy, and he had a natural teaching ability, but from the start, I invested too much of myself in him.
There’s a term for the relationship that formed between us: “work spouse.” It’s a common relationship, and an easy one to fall into. When you spend eight to ten hours a day with a man and travel with him for work, you naturally form an emotional bond, often sharing moments and feelings that aren’t appropriate between coworkers. I had gone down this path with Jason and Craig, but I didn’t have a sexual attraction toward them. That’s part of what made Randy so unprecedented in my career.
As for Randy’s thoughts, I can’t say. He was too much of a gentleman to reveal them. I don’t know if he saw me as his work wife the way I saw him as my work husband—all I can say is, when he brought his real wife into the office, he didn’t introduce us. For my part, I felt guilty about wanting to cheat, but only because I knew it was wrong as a general principle. The only thing stopping me from banging Randy Goodman was Randy Goodman.
Joe treated Randy like his golden boy. Whenever Randy and I were alone, Joe appeared out of thin air and found some excuse to take Randy away. Many times, I asked Joe to transfer me to marketing—Randy’s department—and every time, he walked out of my office in disgust.
I felt that Joe wanted to get rid of me. I had been at RCA for only a few months when he tried to foist me on Joel Katz and Don Perry at Kane Records. I knew of Joel Katz—he was Charlie Minor’s attorney (I always laughed at how Charlie, with his southern accent, pronounced it “Jo-elle”)—but I wanted nothing to do with music-business attorneys after the Peter Lopez debacle. Also, Joe Galante was a longtime client of Joel’s, and many on the RCA staff were also his clients. Joe even gave Joel the label/production deal that turned into Kane Records.
Joel Katz was based in Atlanta, a hotbed of talent at the time. He represented L.A. Reid, Babyface, Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis, and Dallas Austin (years later, when Dallas Austin was arrested in Dubai and sentenced to four years in prison for bringing cocaine into the country, Joel spent ten days in Dubai and worked with Senator Orrin Hatch to secure his release). Joel also represented country legends like Willie Nelson and George Strait, and he did them a great service—most labels paid country and R&B acts a lower royalty rate than pop acts. Joel Katz changed that for country artists.
Joel dominated the legal side of the business. He put his longtime partner, friend, confidant, and problem solver, Don Perry, in charge of the artists. Don was Joel’s sidekick. If you wanted to get to Joel, you had to get through Don. If you wanted to get to both of them, you had to cough up a fat fee. Unlike Joe Galante, these guys had street smarts. I had street smarts, too, but they weren’t enough to put me on the level of Joel Katz and Don Perry.
Joe Galante set up a meeting for me in Atlanta toward the end of 1991, and Joel Katz showed up dressed head to toe in lavish designer clothing. He was always the best-dressed man in the music business. He said that only the elite worked for him, and I guessed that excluded me. He didn’t make an offer, and I returned to RCA, where Too Short was cold and condescending, Tisch rarely came to work, and my only reason for sticking around was Randy Goodman.
Joe, Ric, and Randy reminded me of the Atlantic triptych of Ahmet, Doug, and Jason, but the situation was even more unbearable. Joe was a narcissist like Ahmet, but he wasn’t fun like Ahmet. He was demanding, distrustful, detached, and passive-aggressive. I never felt secure. He told me I was doing well, but he didn’t act like he meant it. No one but Randy Goodman was good enough for him, and he even treated Randy like shit. I saw anxiety on Randy’s face daily. Joe tried to control our every action. He wanted us to be robots, automatons, copies of him—and yet, he didn’t even meet his own expectations. If he had to work for himself, he would be fired.
Joe and Doug had much in common. Both were cunning, both were condescending, both were adept at the art of the mind fuck, and both knew how to work their company systems to benefit themselves. Joe took nepotism to a new level at RCA, in violation of BMG’s strict corporate policies. His sister-in-law worked for the company. She was nice, but we all had to kiss her ass because she acted as his spy. His daughter worked at BMG. His ex-wife, Georgeann, managed artists on the RCA country label, and his third wife had been a product manager at Arista, RCA’s sister label. I was also suspicious of the Nashville travel agency Joe made us use—they’d give him all the details whenever we traveled, allowing him to keep an eye on us at all times. I knew many people in Nashville from my days traveling with Ahmet, but I didn’t trust Joe with that information.
Another thing Joe and Doug had in common—along with every other man I worked for—was their love of petty gossip. One day I went to visit my husband at Atlantic, and Doug invited me to his office. He wanted dirt on Joe. “I heard he was a country bumpkin,” Doug said. I didn’t respond. I knew Doug didn’t understand country music. Back when I worked for him, I often suggested that we use some of our country acts as songwriters for our pop acts. Doug always said the same thing: “Sweetheart, don’t worry about those people.” Whatever problems I had with Joe, I knew he was a pioneer in country music. He signed Alabama—an act Doug had tried and failed to sign. He signed Clint Black. He worked with Dolly Parton, the Judds, Ronnie Milsap, Lorrie Morgan, Martina McBride, and so many others, helping to build them into stadium acts. But the heads of the New York record companies didn’t let Joe into their little cabal. He was too New York for Nashville and too Nashville for New York.
Increasingly, I found myself the target of Joe’s anger. Part of this was my fault—I still did business the Ahmet Ertegun way and didn’t fully grasp how my behavior came across in a normal business setting. Randy tried to teach me, but old habits die hard. For example, at one conference in Atlanta, Randy gave a speech, and I sat in the back of the room watching. When he finished, I let out a piercing, two-fingers-in-the-mouth, Brooklyn-schoolyard-style whistle. Joe spun his head around like Linda Blair in The Exorcist to see who it was. He leveled me with a look like he was about to brand my ass with the scarlet letter—A, for Ahmet and Atlantic.
Another time, in preparation for a corporate retreat, Joe sent a memo around saying those below the title of VP had to share a room to save money. Joe was famously stingy with his workers, and infamously liberal with his artists—he paid $30 million for ZZ Top, an aging act with no hits on the horizon, but God forbid his employees waste a dollar on their comfort. Joe wanted us to write our choice of roommate on the memo, so I wrote Randy Goodman’s name on it in capital letters. I thought it was funny. I knew Ahmet would have loved it. Joe, on the other hand, returned the memo to me. At the top, in big black letters, he wrote, “NOT FUNNY.”
Male executives, such as Ric Aliberte, received different treatment. At the time, Ric lived in Woodstock, a hundred miles away from the RCA office. Joe rented him an apartment closer to the city, with the understanding that Ric would eventually move permanently. Instead, Ric bought a new house in Woodstock and used the company car service for the two-hour ride back home. Jack Carden, the financial guy at RCA, wore the carpet out to Ric’s office crying about the bills—one was $13,000 for a month’s worth of car service. Ric didn’t give a shit, and Joe let him get away with it over and over again.
It was not as if Ric was raking in the hits. The A&R Department under his watch was like a five-alarm fire, and instead of putting it out, Ric threw gallons of gasoline on it while Joe gave him more and more money to keep the fire blazing. Even when Ric finally committed an unpardonable offense, Joe didn’t fire him. Instead, he began looking for someone to hire over Ric—a senior vice president of A&R.
One day I got called into Joe’s office. I hated going to Joe’s office—it was ugly, and it usually contained Joe—but he was the boss, and I had no choice. I went. As soon as I entered, I noticed Joe’s face was red with anger. He raised his voice to me. Apparently, Joe had received a call from Joe Eisenstein, the senior VP of human resources at BMG. Eisenstein alerted Joe that Ric had authorized an unexplained $2,500 cash advance, and it was rumored to be for an employee’s breast enhancement surgery. Joe waved the paperwork at me and told me to look at it. I had heard something about the surgery months ago, but it didn’t affect me, so I forgot it.
“Joe, I had nothing to do with this,” I said. “That’s not my signature. I’m not a VP, so I can’t sign for a cash advance.” I was confused. Why was Joe talking to me about this and not the VP of the A&R Department? I felt embarrassed and somehow degraded, as if the only reason I had to listen to this harangue was that I was the only woman in the A&R Department.
Joe’s anger abated into introspection. “I’m not a bad person,” he said. “If someone needs surgery, I’ll help them. But not for tits.” Then his anger swelled again. “As far as I’m concerned,” he spat, “they aren’t big enough for the trouble.”
I shuddered inwardly. The whole situation was fucked up—Joe should have never had this conversation with me. I was angry that he did. I should have approached Joe Eisenstein at BMG personnel, gotten Joe Galante fired, and left with a fat check. But like with Ahmet, Doug, and Irving, I wanted Joe’s approval, so I said nothing.
Same mistake, different man.